Sold on Adobe Spry

Day 4 of CFUNITED and I am in a session on integrating Adobe Spry (Abode's free AJAX Library) into your ColdFusion application being presented by Andrew Powell. I must admit, I am sold. Ray Camden has posted numerous examples of using Spry and I have never had the time to give them an honest look, but now I am going to.

CFEclipse - Dictionary View

It's Day 3 of CFUNITED and I had the pleasure of seeing Mark Drew present on Advanced CFEclipse. It's cool to see the main developer use the product how he envisions it to be used.

I started using CFEclipse so long ago that I have forgotten how long it's been now. But the first thing I must have done is removed the Outline, Methods, and Dictionary views from my default perspective (probably because they take up screen space I would rather dedicate to viewing my code). Mark demo'd these views and showed how useful they can be to developers and I think I made a mistake when I removed them. I have now reset my CFEclipse perspective to the default so I can use these views again.

One of the main reasons I have kept HomeSite+ installed on my Windows system is that I love the Function/Tag explorer built-in to it (Right Click > Edit Expression). I didn't know that I get almost the exact same functionality with CFEclipse's Dictionary view. I am now going to be opening HomeSite+ a lot less. I also hate to say it, but also this takes some of the need for CFQuickDocs away as well (sorry Jake).

If CFEclipse could gain a Search/Replace tool set that could match HomeSite+ I think I could complete ditch it (come on, multi-line strings please).

If you are interested in the Photo application I demonstrated at the end, please contact me via e-mail and I will send you notice when the project is available on RIAForge.org.

I really hope everyone enjoyed and found my presentation useful. I enjoyed the experience and have much respect for the whole CFUNITED / Teratech team especially Liz who is the major player in keeping it running.